Richard Gunther

Species of Political Parties A New Typology

While the literature already includes a large number of party typologies, they are increasingly incapable of capturing the great diversity of party types that have emerged worldwide in recent decades, largely because most typologies were based upon West European parties as they existed in the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Some new party types have been advanced, but in an ad hoc manner and on the basis of widely varying and often inconsistent criteria. This article is an effort to set many of the commonly used conceptions of parties into a coherent framework, and to delineate new party types whenever the existing models are incapable of capturing important aspects of contemporary parties. We classify each of 15 ‘species’ of party into its proper ‘genus’ on the basis of three criteria: (1) the nature of the party’s organization (thick/thin, elite-based or mass-based, etc.); (2) the programmatic orientation of the party (ideological, particularistic-clientele-oriented, etc.); and (3) tolerant and pluralistic (or democratic) versus proto-hegemonic (or anti-system). While this typology lacks parsimony, we believe that it captures more accurately the diversity of the parties as they exist in the contemporary democratic world, and is more conducive to hypothesistesting and theory-building than others.

The Politics of democratic consolidation : southern Europe in comparative perspective

In The Politics of Democratic Consolidation, a distinguished group of internationally recognized scholars focus on four nations of Southern Europe-Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece-which have successfully consolidated their democratic regimes. Contributors are P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, Richard Gunther, Hans-Jurgen Puhle, Edward Malefakis, Juan J. Linz, Alfred Stepan, Felipe Aguero, Geoffrey Pridham, Sidney Tarrow, Leonardo Morlino, Jose R. Montero, Gianfranco Pasquino, and Philippe C. Schmitter.

Electoral Laws, Party Systems, and Elites: The Case of Spain

Using aggregate, survey, and in-depth elite interview data from Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, I demonstrate that the “mechanical” effect of the Spanish electoral law is as strong as that of many single-member constituency systems. But the “distal” effect of the electoral law on the party system is shown to be complex and multifaceted, not direct and deterministic. The perceptions, calculations, strategies, and behavior of party elites play a crucial intervening role between the electoral law and the overall shape of the party system.

Democracy in Spain: Legitimacy, Discontent, and Disaffection

This article examines changes in perceptions of democracy in Spain over the last two decades. A variety of empirical indicators gleaned from numerous surveys are used to distinguish between democratic legitimacy and political discontent, as well as between this (which includes the well-known indicator of dissatisfaction with the way democracy works) and political disaffection. The article traces the different ways in which these attitudes have evolved in Spain over the last twenty years, and demonstrates that they belong to different dimensions. It also includes the results of two tests showing that these two sets of attitudes are conceptually and empirically distinct: a factor analysis confirms the distinct clustering of the indicators at the, individual level, whilst cohort analysis identifies different patterns of continuity and change across generations.

A mediterranean model of democracy? The Southern European democracies in comparative perspective

The four Southern European democracies ‐ Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece ‐ have a number of important cultural, social, economic, and historical characteristics in common, and their political systems are also often seen as similar, representing a ‘Mediterranean model of democracy’. However, when these four democratic regimes are compared with the worlds other democracies in terms of the contrasting majoritarian and consensus models, they turn out not to form a distinctive and cohesive cluster. The concluding section suggests several explanations for this unexpected finding.

Actitudes hacia la democracia en España: legitimidad, descontento y desafección

Este articulo examina las principales actitudes hacia la democracia en Espana durante las dos ultimas decadas. Se han seleccionado numerosos indicadores empiricos para diferenciar tres facetas que suelen considerarse indistintamente, y por lo tanto confundirse de forma sistematica: la legitimidad democratica, el descontento politico y la desafeccion politica. En el articulo se analiza su evolucion respectiva desde la transicion democratica, y se mantiene que pertenecen a dimensiones conceptuales y empiricas diferentes. Para ello se incluyen, ademas, los resultados de dos tipos de pruebas: un analisis factorial confirma el distinto agrupamiento de los indicadores en el nivel individual, y un analisis de cohortes identifica pautas diferenciadas de continuidad y cambio en las distintas generaciones.

Democracy and the Media: The Media in Democratic and Nondemocratic Regimes: A Multilevel Perspective

The mass communications media are the connective tissue of democracy. They are the principal means through which citizens and their elected representatives communicate in their reciprocal efforts to inform and influence. Despite the widespread acknowledgment of the paramount importance of this “political communications” function, however, the literature in political science is notable for the general absence of rigorous comparative analyses of the mutually influencing interaction between the flow of political information, on the one hand, and the basic democratic character of political regimes and individual political attitudes and behavior, on the other. As one student of politics and the media has recently bemoaned: “The state of research on media effects is one of the most notable embarrassments of modern social science” (Bartels 1993,267). An important obstacle to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the media and the democratic political process has long been the lack of an integrated research agenda. Compartmentalization and fragmentation have resulted not only from the scattering of scholars among different academic disciplines (mainly sociology, political science, social psychology, and communications) that rarely interact with one another, but also from a puzzling and seemingly unnecessary bifurcation into distinct schools of analysis. One scholarly approach has been for media analysts to adopt a micro perspective in their focus on the questions of how, and in what ways, the media matter. They have restricted themselves to investigations of the individual-level effects of political communications, usually during election campaigns.

Ciudadanos y partidos en el sur de Europa: los sentimientos antipartidistas

Este articulo explora las actitudes antipartidistas de los ciudadanos, un supuesto rasgo de las democracias occidentales tan frecuentemente aducido como escasamente estudiado. En el analisis empirico de cuatro paises del sur de Europa hemos encontrado que las orientaciones antipartidistas presentan dos dimensiones. Una de ellas, a la que hemos llamado antipartidismo «reactivo», parece cambiar en respuesta a circunstancias politicas coyunturales. La otra dimension, denominada antipartidismo «cultural», esta caracterizada por su estabilidad y su vinculacion con bajos niveles educativos y cotas reducidas de informacion politica.Y mientras que el antipartidismo reactivo no tiene implicaciones actitudinales o participativas significativas, el cultural parece formar parte de un sindrome mas amplio de desafeccion politica.

The Impact of Regime Change on Public Policy: The Case of Spain

Does political regime matter? Parallel analyses of Spanish public expenditure and taxation policies under the authoritarian Franco regime and in the current democracy, as well as of decision-making processes under both regimes, based upon extensive in-depth interviews with relevant government officials from 1974 to 1996, indicate that political regime characteristics can have a profound impact on both policy processes and outputs. Ruling out a ‘socioeconomic’ explanation, the author concludes that striking aberrations in state spending and taxation policies in the early 1970s were systematic products of unusual features of Franquist policy-making processes, which were directly linked to the authoritarian nature of the regime itself. Subsequently, democratization has been accompanied by dramatic changes in both policy processes and outputs.

Legitimidade política em novas democracias

There is no clear consensus whether attitudes supportive of democarcy and democratic citizenship constitute a single attitudinal domain, or are empirically distinct from each other.In empirical studies os attitudes and behavior in Bulgaria, Chile, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Spain and Uruguay, we find clear evidence that such attitudes ares both conceptually and empirically distinct, forming three different attitudinal performance of democracy, and political disaffection.These threee clusters have distinctly different behavioral correlates: disatisfaction leads to votes against the incumbent party; a lack of diffuse system support is associated with votes for anti-democratic parties; and disaffection leads to low citizen involvement in democratic politics. We find no consistent evidence that diffuse support for democracy is dependent on satisfaction with the performance of democracy.